Why AI SEO is the wrong answer to the right problem
The anxiety is real—but treating AI visibility as an optimisation problem misses what's actually happening. Discovery changed. The question is: are you solving for interpretation or just chasing new rankings?
The anxiety is real.
Buyers are using AI to research suppliers. Your rankings feel less reliable. Traffic patterns are shifting. And the agencies that sold you SEO for fifteen years are now selling you "AI SEO."
The concern is valid. The solution is not.
The real problem
Discovery is changing. Technical buyers, procurement teams, and executives are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to shortlist vendors before ever visiting a website.
That behaviour creates a new filtration layer — one that happens before traffic, before clicks, before your analytics register anything at all.
Companies that rank well in Google can still be excluded from AI-generated shortlists. The SEO playbook that drove pipeline for years no longer fully explains what determines discovery.
So the question is real: if AI is mediating research, what do we optimise for?
The industry's answer has been predictable.
The industry reflex
When a new channel emerges, the pattern is always the same. Take the old playbook. Add "for AI" to the name. Rebrand the deliverables. Sell it as the solution.
"AI SEO" is the natural reflex of an industry built on optimisation. It treats the shift in discovery as a new ranking problem — something that can be solved with better keywords, smarter schema, and tactical adjustments to how content is structured for AI consumption.
The logic feels intuitive: if AI is reading your site, optimise your site for AI. Treat it like a new search engine with different rules.
But that framing misses the actual problem.
The category error
SEO optimises for position. It answers the question: "How do we rank higher?"
AI doesn't rank you. It decides whether it can confidently represent you.
The question AI systems ask is not "Does this page have the right keywords?" but "Can I extract, understand, and trust this organisation's expertise well enough to mention them to a buyer without hallucination?"
If the answer is unclear — if your content structure is fragmented, your claims are unsupported, your expertise is scattered across disconnected pages, or your site feels incoherent when interpreted as a whole — AI doesn't penalise you with a lower ranking.
It excludes you entirely.
This is not an optimisation problem. It's an interpretation problem.
What gets missed
"AI SEO" assumes the loss is visible. That better tactics will show up in better metrics. That you can A/B test your way to visibility.
But when AI filters you out of a shortlist, there is no traffic drop. No ranking decline. No bounce rate spike. No alert in your CRM.
A procurement team asks AI to list qualified suppliers in your category. Your company doesn't appear. The buyer never visits your site. Your analytics show nothing.
You weren't outranked. You were never considered.
This is why companies can invest heavily in "AI SEO" — optimising schema, restructuring content for featured snippets, targeting question-format keywords — and still quietly disappear from AI-mediated buying journeys.
The tactics address visibility. They don't address interpretability.
The better frame
AI visibility is not AI SEO with a different name.
It's a recognition that discovery now happens in two stages:
First, AI systems interpret your business — extracting entities, mapping relationships, assessing coherence, and building confidence that you are who you claim to be.
Second, humans interact with that interpretation — through search results, AI-generated answers, or research summaries.
SEO optimises the second stage. AI visibility addresses the first.
The work is architectural, not tactical. It's about how your expertise is structured, how your claims are supported, how your content relates across your domain, and whether AI systems can confidently represent you without fabricating details.
That's not something you optimise with keywords. It's something you build with clarity, density, and coherence.
Where this leaves you
If you're evaluating "AI SEO agencies," ask one question:
Are they optimising how AI finds you — or how AI understands you?
If the answer is optimisation, you're solving the wrong problem.
Further reading: What is AI visibility AEO vs SEO vs AI visibility